Details

CPU Clock Rate

3.4 GHz

GPU Core Clock Rate

1.2 GHz

GPU Effective Memory Clock Rate

1.35 GHz

GPU Temperature While Idle

34.0° C

GPU Temperature Under Load

62.0° C

Description

The last time I built my own computer back in the Radeon 9800 pro days, once that got outdated, I started using a crappy stock HP desktop with a HD 5670 for the past 3-4 years. I finally landed an I.T. job and had the funds to buy something nice for myself. I was looking to build a mid-range gaming computer with a budget of less than $1000. Through several months of saving up money, researching, and finding sales, I finally built a system that I am content with.

I know I could have gone with a non-mechanical keyboard and just bought a 7950, but I have been thoroughly enjoying the feel and responsiveness of my Storm Trigger, and I do not regret buying it one bit.

I have not OC'd my CPU & GPU yet, but I plan on doing so in the near future.

I also tried with my cable management, it looks all right, but I feel like I could have done a better job. :/

Notes:

My graphics card was the last item I received, so you may notice one picture with my lame HD 5670.

My kingston SSD sata port was defective, it was really loose and fell off the first time I plugged it in. I know Kingston doesn't cover accidental damage, but I am about to send it in for an RMA early next week, hopefully they will replace it, but I am not counting on it. :(

Although PCpartpicker states that my build is ~$1200, I actually managed to get it a little under $1000 through several sales (and no MIRs).

However, I personally ran into some problems since the closet microcenter from where I live is over 300 miles away. Since the 3570k is an in-store only offer, I had to try out 3 Fry's before I could price match. The first two stores told me since it was not local, they could not price match. Luckily, the Palo Alto, CA Fry's was rather lenient and let me price match.

I was definitely considering the 660ti as it was the only other comparable card to the HD 7870. However I went with the 7870 for several reasons:

1) The 660ti was around $290 on Amazon, and all the benchmarks and research I did led me to believe that the extra $50 was not worth it,
especially if I OC'd. The 660ti out performs the 7870 in several
instances, however, the 7870 seemed to have a better cost-performance ratio than the 660ti. I also had a $40 giftcard for Amazon, which I wanted to use on my new GPU.

2) The HD 7870 has a bigger memory bus than the 660ti, better DirectC and OpenCL support, better tessellation performance, and overclocking seemed to be better.

Thanks about the SSD, I am going to send it in tomorrow. If that doesn't work, I may need to resort to getting an Extended warranty off Newegg and try going through them. :(

Nice build, but I feel like you overpaid for the CPU as I run the same graphics card and type of ram but I got a AMD FX-6300 (3.5 Ghz) for about $120. Then again, Processing power is probably the fastest growing market in the industry so that depends heavily on when you purchased your intel CPU.